Green, Green Grass (of Home)

    The clouds of late fall are always a changing spectacle as storms come and go and the sun drops lower and lower in the sky (actually, it's not the sun dropping at all but rather our planet's orbit "tilting" its angle to the sun).  It's all a reminder, along with the slurry of leaves that continue to tax my mulching mower, that one had better ready oneself for the next season, that cold is coming and that shortages or changing tastes may be on the horizon...inflation comes in many forms.  Just a quick peek outside shows nature's workers already nestled in well ahead of time as squirrels and bees, ants and hummingbirds, all no longer seem to make an appearance.  It would seem that the only ones oblivious to what may be waiting ahead for us might be ourselves, the bevvy of new cars populating the roads and the homes that continue to sell well above their asking prices, blurring our vision temporarily (we hope).  Retailers appear to sense the restless mood up ahead, that of cyber buying and the coming holidays.

    Reach up and touch the sky, sang Jimi Hendrix, a feat well beyond our imagination but one that seems to echo our feelings of wanting more.  The grass is greener on the far side of the hill.  We're always looking, just as my wife and I did during our drive up the Oregon coast.  As we finally emerged from the exceptionally pleasant detoured drive that takes you a long ways through redwoods before you can leave the California border and enter Oregon, we came to --and zoomed past-- the first city there, Brookings, OR.  And it was only weeks later, well after our return home, that we read this in the Moon guide: There are people who don't like Brookings, and if you form your judgement by simply driving down U.S. 101, it's easy to join that crowd.  But something as simple as turning off into Harris Beach State Park can begin to change your view...Enough 60-70°F days occur during January and February in this south coast "banana belt" town that more than 50 species of flowering plants thrive here* -- along with retirees, sports enthusiasts, and beachcombers.  Gulp.  Even with our planned leisurely pace of no plans, my wife and I did exactly that and zoomed past the city without blinking, viewing it only through the car window as just another city to pass by..  

    It somehow reminded me of being back home, that here outside my door me was a nightly display of beautiful fall sunsets and I was not looking up, or at least not looking up often enough.  Just as with the city of Brookings, I was zooming past what was just in front of me.  Truth be told, my wife and I were slightly embarrassed at how little we knew of our home town, perhaps because the friends we had visited had known so much about theirs, from the geology of the area to the history of the peaks and valleys that surrounded them.  Not us.  Only recently did I discover that the mountain ranges that surround my city (Salt Lake City) --the Oquirrhs to the west, the Wasatch and Uintas to the east-- were indigenous names and remain among the few things left of the early peoples' history, despite them having resided peacefully here for some 1400 years before being driven off (it should be noted that the majority, if not all, of the native American tribes feel that you can't own the earth anymore than you can "own" the water, air or sunlight); turns out that eradicating the early peoples off of "their" land would be repeated throughout the West, much of it taking place in Oregon and the northern coast of California as well, as noted in a piece in the in The New York Times.  And it appears not to have stopped.  As Navajo citizen Pauly Denetclaw wrote: COVID-19 was the most recent blight on the Navajo Nation.  At the beginning of the pandemic, I hoped that the land's vastness would shield us.  It didn't.  COVID-19 ravaged my community, and at one point we led the country in per capita cases.  We closed our lands to visitors. We asked them not to come. They did anyway.  Just as a reminder, this month of November is Native American Heritage month...

     Conde Nast's Traveler recently did a series of articles which featured local residents giving you insider tips on their country or city.  Argentina may be known as the tango capital of the world but next in line was...Finland?  But beyond the trivial came this interaction from a visitor to a small village in China: The next day dawned chilly and overcast but pearl-like. We boarded a bus and arrived at a tiny, deserted village, barely more than a street with a row of modest courtyard homes.  But through their open entryways, to my delight, I could spy dozens and dozens of ceramic animals...Locals earn a living selling them to visitors, though on that day my husband and I appeared to be the only ones.  As I chatted with the man, I could tell that he was studying me.  I braced myself for the usual questions about where I was from, what I was doing here.  Instead, he asked if we'd eaten lunch yet.  His wife, quiet but smiling, brought out steaming bowls of noodles mixed with vinegar and chili oil and studded with carrots the color of tomatoes.  Together we sat and ate.  After some time I volunteered that we were from America, but the comment elicited only mild interest...(today) the pieces decorate my child's nursery and my own bedrooms, evoking not so much a place as a feeling.  They remind me of that lunch in Liuying, talking about things that were quotidian and joyful in the best kind of way -- an afternoon that felt sunny, even on a gray winter's day.

    Popular Science once asked why we are nostalgic, noting that the word nostalgia once signified a disease (from the Greek nostos and algos meaning homecoming pain).  A study by neuroscientists in Japan: ...found that nostalgic images tax the memory-managing hippocampus more than other sights, as people mine autobiographical details deep in the past.  This mental effort pays off: As the hippocampus activates, so too does the ventral striatum, another of the brain’s dopaminergic reward centers.  No matter if little of that made sense for the same issue had Alissa Walker, an editor for Curbed, writing: Looking back at American cities during the 1970s, you see a loss of social cohesion from neglecting the public realm -- not just parks, but also sidewalks, trees, streetlights, benches.  Little moments that make you feel welcome.  The most resilient cities never forget the importance of this.

    Our drive through the coasts of the Western states made both my wife and I remember how much we had missed the oceans we knew as children, me the Pacific and her the Atlantic.  We considered (half-heartedly) moving back to one of the coasts, something we knew needed to be done within the next five years or it would never happen.  But which coast?  I must admit that throughout the Cornish coast of England there are indeed benches scattered throughout the coastal trails, reminders that somewhere along the path it might be a good time to stop and just take in the view.  Of course, we also knew that if we did undertake such a move that it wouldn't be too many years before we'd notice that the salt air was rusting our cars and the dampness was taxing any wood siding on our new "home."  But then there would be the relaxing sights and sounds of the ocean and the lifestyle that went with it.  All of it begged the question, at what point would we be happy?  More importantly, why were we looking to move at all?

     Part of what I enjoy about living in a place with all four seasons is that despite the mulch, mulch, mulching of leaves, it marks an entry into a world of its own forced relaxing as if coming to a bench on the coast...the mowers get put away, the outside water gets shut off, the stew and casserole recipes begin to come back out.  But as nice as that annual pause is, is it really that feeling of the green, green grass of home?  Traffic is now everywhere as our freeways move to 5 and 6 lanes in each direction; 800-unit apartment buildings are becoming as common as the tiny homes that are now vanishing.  Our "home" is changing.  Hawaii pig farmer Brandon Lee wrote in Traveler: Hawaii people are loyal to their land.  I know everybody kind of feels that way about their hometown, but they don't to the extent of Hawaii's people.  I remember we moved away to Colorado for two years when we were young and came back.  The air smells like flowers, like pikake, which is a flower you have at weddings -- it just does.  So every time you smell that smell, you think of your wedding day, one of the happiest days of your life.  When I’m on the mainland, as soon as I get off the plane, it smells different.  It doesn't smell like home -- I can tell.  Some people can't even taste pork from chicken, but I can tell when I’m not home.

    Blame Frederick Law Olmsted, wrote Popular Science: In the 1860s, a group of local investors wanted to lure home buyers to their land, so they commissioned landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted to design the antidote for crowded urban life.  He drew inspiration from his tours of England’s public gardens, and dotted his blueprints with large parks and green plazas.  He also wanted to create natural spaces that residents could see and reach from their front doors.  To do this, he sat all houses 30 feet back from the road, behind close-cut lawns and two well-spaced trees.  The rest, as they say, is history.  Consider this from The Washington Post: There are an estimated 40 million to 50 million acres of lawn in the continental United States -- that’s nearly as much as all of the country’s national parks combined.  In 2020, Americans spent $105 billion keeping their lawns verdant and neat.  But our grass addiction comes at an environmental cost.  According to the Environmental Protection Agency, maintaining those lawns also consumes nearly 3 trillion gallons of water a year as well as 59 million pounds of pesticides, which can seep into our land and waterways.  Department of Transportation data shows that in 2018, Americans used nearly 3 billion gallons of gasoline running lawn and garden equipment.  That’s the equivalent of 6 million passenger cars running for a year. **

    The various songs of the grass being greener over the next hill shows our urge to seemingly always want more.  But really these are all first-world desires for so many people just want somewhere, anywhere, to call home.  Renters wonder if they'll ever be able to afford their own home, while refugees just want a chance to call any place home.  The Russians have a saying, wrote a piece in The New York Review of Books: Sytyi gololdnogo ne razumeet -- the well-fed do not understand the starving.  My wife and I watched a 2017 movie titled Hamstead, a flashback to my wife's childhood when she used to walk several miles alone to Hamstead Heath, back in the day when even as a 10-year old a child could do so without worry.  The homes there now are priced well out of the range of most people but the movie deals with a homeless person living inside the 800-acre park.  At a court hearing where he now faces eviction from his "home," he tells the judge that he's not homeless.  "I have a home.  It's my home.  It's where I belong."  

    We all have a home here on a planet we seem intent on abusing.  Author Peter McBride wrote this about the Amazon rainforest in his book, Seeing Silence: In the last few years, 12 million hectares of rainforest have been cleared per year. That is the equivalent of clearing out four New York City Central Parks an hour -- 24 hours a day, 52 weeks a year.  Perhaps it is our nature to be restless and to not be satisfied, to pull that slot machine lever just one more time, or so we say.  But at the same time we seem to also look back and envy those who are content to remain in their small village, to love their land and to treasure the place they call home.  Often I feel that a sage is peering over my shoulder, puzzled at my searching for something or somewhere else as if I should know that it doesn't matter where you are physically but rather where you are inside yourself.    

    Perhaps our fate will be one that mirrors the fate of the Battlestar Gallactica, an almost-ancient 2003 television series that found the last vestiges of the human race scrambling to escape the Cylons they had created.  The remaining human-filled ship has to leave for a galaxy or a universe unknown, to head to a place which they consider imaginary and the stuff of legend...to a place called Earth.  Whatever we may think about where we live, whether we are happy and content, or anxious and restless, I would think that if any of us were out in space, drifting and facing uncertainty, we would be united in only one thought, that we would want to return home. 

 

*Indeed Brookings is the Easter lily capital of the world (what??) and hosts a population of only 6400+, 3x more than the neighboring town north of it, Gold Beach, a city which once drew celebrities such as Winston Churchill and Clark Gable who came not for the gold that once-sparkled in the beach's sands but rather for the "silver" salmon that spawned up the Rogue River which feeds its shores. 

**With a tiny bit of bragging rights, I must note that my 24-volt rechargeable mower is now passing its 10th year and still doing an excellent job, especially when it comes to mulching leaves!  

On a side note, take a peek at the viewpoint of "home" from the newsletter of National Geographic...